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Every Little
Step A
wonderful documentary snuck into a few theatres this summer, called
“Every Little Step,” a bad title for a fascinating film. It’s the real-life story of the
casting of parts for a revival of the Broadway show, “A Chorus
Line.” You may recall that
the original show was based largely on a late-night taping by the
choreographer Michael Bennett of a group of dancers – their dreams,
their frustrations, the stories of some of their lives – but always the
fact that every one of them had a life-long vision of being a dancer. The
show that Bennett and Marvin Hamlisch and others
put together ended up running 15 years on Broadway. This film is about the casting of the
first revival of the musical, and it is focused only on the casting, which turns
out to be as compelling and exciting and sad and exhilarating as the theatre
can be. At the first open call
for dancers who could also sing, there were 3,000 applicants, who stood on
line outside the theatre where the staff could see them in groups of ten and
make the first preliminary cuts. The
number of dancers slowly gets whittled down to the 17 who will work in the
show (plus understudies) over a period of a half a year or more. They are drilled in the numbers by a
wonderful dance mistress named Baayork Lee, a
4-foot-10-inch dancer who played Connie in the original show. As the finalists are picked, the
tension mounts; we see the auditions, the rehearsals of songs, the attitudes
the characters are supposed to convey, all in front of the director, the
producer and one or two others.
Everyone wants to be selected, and we in the audience also have our
favorites; sometimes we win, sometimes we lose. One of the finalists is the daughter
of the great dancer Jacques d’Amboise. Others we’ve not heard of
before. We learn a little bit of
the lives of most of them, but mainly we become directors ourselves; as we
watch the finalists, the question is whom would we choose. The tension mounts, as they say, and
we are right there. |